


Distance

by bwinkbear



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Secret Santa, babey ice uwuwuwuwu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:54:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28388850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bwinkbear/pseuds/bwinkbear
Summary: As Eiríkur grows up, he begins to find that he needs his parents as much as they need him, which is more than they can let on.
Relationships: Denmark & Iceland (Hetalia), Denmark/Norway (Hetalia), Hong Kong & Iceland (Hetalia), Iceland & Turkey (Hetalia)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 30
Collections: Nordictalia Secret Santa





	Distance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [puffintalia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/puffintalia/gifts).



> merry christmas and... oh my gosh, happy birthday art!!
> 
> i would first like to apologize for how long you've had to wait for your gift. i don't know if it's what i would consider ready even now but i have ben's approval and i guess that's enough because i wouldn't be doing much keeping it in my possesion any longer. 
> 
> also i'm so sorry you knew who was writing for you. and that it was me. lmao. 
> 
> nevertheless i hope you have a good day and that you enjoy this!! 
> 
> p.s. u have ur gift im taking ur identity again xox

Henrik found himself stalking at the doorway of his husband's office once the clock struck ten, peering inside to the man hunched over his latest opus. Sigurd was often much too invested into his writing, and tonight he'd been going at it for a few hours now without a break to speak of. This was ordinary to the author, and Henrik had been both attentive and patient with the man, but such a night as tonight called for earlier interruption against his typical work-til-you-drop protocol. Henrik's lips squeezed into a gummy smile as he cleared his throat, lips peeking open at Sigurd's halt in concentration to look up.   
  
"Ya ready to call it a night, baby? I've gotta get up early n' all."    
  
Sigurd hesitated with a sigh, heaving up from his desk chair without objection. "Yes, yes, big day tomorrow. S'ppose we've gotta set an example for the little one as well." He glided to Henrik rolling his wrists absently, hestiating in this motion before adding:

"You  _ did _ put him to bed already, right?"   
  
"Of course!" Henrik walked his husband out of his gloomy workspace, hands joined lightly in-tow. Sigurd paused in front of Eiríkur's bedroom, pressing his ear to the newly-painted baby blue door.    
  
"...Good. I'm worried for him, though. First day 'f school s'always a scary one," he whispered. Henrik smoothed his thumb over Sigurd's knuckles in rhythm, pulling him away from the bedroom door to their own.    
  
"He's gonna be fine, he'll be a catch. I'm only one door away, y'now?"    
  
"You'll be working with another class all day. Eikí can't lean on you the whole time- and you know he'll  _ want _ to."   
  
Henrik laughed, immediately sinking into their covers. "I see no problem with that." Sigurd only rolled his eyes, putting a pin in their little spat. It would be continued tomorrow regardless, the way they lovingly fussed over their son.

Eríkur was six now and going into his first day of grade school tomorrow. The child was always dependent on his parents for a lot, from crying for them in daycare to his shyness asking around for help from anyone else. Sigurd was rightfully concerned about this jump for him, and maybe Henrik was a little bit too, but Henrik was also a substitute teacher for the school and had the upper advantage other clingy parents could only  _ dream _ of: seeing his child in school.   
  
Henrik wasn't sleeping for much longer than an hour when he was awoken by the creaking of their door, soft hallway lighting pouring into the dark of their room with little Eiríkur standing inside it. He sniffled lightly, waddling to Henrik's side of the bed with his tiny fingers clamped together.    
  
"I can't sleep." His voice was whiny in tone, accentuated by the restless drawl of his words.   
  


Eiríkur only ever issued such a complaint in attempts to sleep in Henrik and Sigurd's room, a habit only Henrik would encourage while Sigurd was always too passed out to object. The awake father hummed sympathetically, rasping out, "Close the door." 

Henrik scooted closer to the edge of his bed and lifted the corners of their blanket as an invitation. Eiríkur nodded quickly and shuffled his way to complete the task, keeping his volume down in practice as he tiptoed across the carpet and into the warmth of the covers with his dads. He couldn't help but giggle despite his tears and kick his stubby legs up and down, enjoying Henrik's company.

"Shh, your father's sleeping. Don't want him to be all grumpy when he wakes up," Henrik hummed. Eiríkur nodded and burrowed his head into the man's chest, pulling the blanket close to his chin. Henrik ran his fingers through the translucent locks splayed across him, running the pads of his fingers across the boy's scalp with a deliberate tenderness.

He felt as if he coddled the boy too much, cuddling with him like so on a night marking the grade-school development milestone, but Henrik would be lying if he said he didn't love it. Eiríkur was Sigurd's, not his, yet the child had come to love him and depend on him so much when his other father couldn't. That definitely meant something, and as Henrik smoothed Eiríkur's hair behind the shell of his ears, he couldn't help but wonder who was getting more out of this exchange.    
  
Morning came sooner than any of the three would've liked, Henrik's acoustic phone alarm ringing like a headache at the unforgiving hour of six a.m. and driving them out of bed before Sigurd could register Eiríkur's company. They had a quick but pleasant breakfast of pancakes with jam (per request of the little one) and secured their Eikí with his favorite light-up sneakers and Pingu lunchbox before Henrik could take him out the door to start their first day together. 

Eiríkur spent his car ride especially quiet, though he wasn't ever the type to babble so easily about anything, likely with the pang of nerves he was dealing with last night. Henrik entertained him in light conversation, the kind that went, "Are ya excited for school? Are ya ready to make some new friends? Do ya know what to do when we go in?", but he never received anything more elaborate than a yes repeated each time. It was hard to get specific or any more engaging with his questions when there was a set of words that would set Eiríkur off if mentioned, primarily "Mr.Adnan" and "Substitute." The last time Henrik tried explaining why he'd be going in with Eiríkur they suffered a meltdown that went on for twenty minutes, no plead or warning good enough to satiate the beast. Simple questions with simple answers would do just fine.

Once they arrived at the school Henrik led Eiríkur straight to Mrs.Héderváry's classroom, the one he was stationed in until she recovered from the flu ( _ and what unfortunate timing she contracted it, _ Henrik lamented as he scribbled his name on her whiteboard). As they were arriving early and the school technically wasn't even open yet, Eiríkur had time to adjust himself to the unfamiliar classroom environment and trace his alphabet on a print-out Henrik gave him- "getting ahead of your little friends," as Henrik put it. He enjoyed the time he had Eiríkur all to himself, before he had to pass him onto a teacher the boy couldn't even stand the name of. Perhaps Henrik was the reason the boy was so spoiled, though he'd never let Sigurd be right about that, nor would he give Sigurd any reason to fret over the boy as well. He was fine because Henrik was here. 

At 7:50 other children started coming into their new classrooms, leaving Henrik to make his walk of shame delivering Eiríkur to Mr.Adnan. He was a dark and burly man, roughly Henrik's height, and seemed much too fit to be a full-time grade school teacher. Henrik struck up a conversation with him, as a parent rather than employee, and the two got along swimmingly as they discussed what they had planned for the school year and how Eiríkur would be coping with it. The topic of Mr.Adnan's name had come up at some point, leaving the man to laugh as he promised to use it sparingly if he could help it. Henrik and Eiríkur shared a quick goodbye hug, the child still rather still and unsure of himself around his unfamiliar classmates, but as Henrik made his way back to Mrs.Héderváry's classroom he was just confident enough in his son's well-being to leave him alone for the morning.

Henrik's own teaching job went smoothly he found, with the children being too shy and nervous to cause any disruption or play too roughly. He went over the classroom protocols Mrs.Héderváry had listed on the wall and let them fill in a worksheet to introduce themselves to their real teacher when she returned. By lunchtime Eiríkur had already slipped from his mind as he conversed with his students over _ how he got hair to stand up like that _ and  _ where his funny accent came from _ (the struggle of being the only Dane in a school of Norwegians), but as he turned his head to direct a student to the restrooms and happened to spot that fuzzy head of white three tables over, all was forgotten and he quickly made his way over. 

"Hey, buddy! How's yer first day goin'?" Henrik took the empty seat next to the boy as he turned away from his classmate, them sharing a bag of pretzels. 

"Henrik! This is Lion, he's sharing his lunch with me." Eiríkur pointed to the boy seated next to him, dead-panned and bearing a dark ponytail that hung down to his waist when he sat. Henrik smiled, quirking his eyebrow.

"Hey, Lion! That's a pretty rad name, huh?"

The boy narrowed his eyes, taking visible offense to Henrik's greeting. "It's  _ Le _ on. I'm not a lion!"

_ But Eikí called you that just five seconds ago… _ "My bad! Ah, so what have you guys been up to in class? Mr.Adnan isn't making you read all morning, is he," Henrik teased. He panicked just after, remembering his child's feelings about Mr.Adnan. It was never a good idea to start that tantrum, especially during school hours.

"No. But he's really old. You should come to our class instead," Eiríkur pouted. Immense relief, followed by a bit of honor!

"Is it true you let your classes eat sweets," Leon gushed, his annoyed expression gone in a flash at the rumor. Henrik wasn't quite sure where Eiríkur got the idea to feed the boy such fibs, but he entertained them nonetheless. 

"Only the good ones! The ones who say I'm much younger and funner than Mr.Adnan~" 

As if on cue, Mr.Adnan sat down from across Henrik holding a tupperware of salad and a devilishly smug expression. Henrik cackled and averted his eyes in shame.

"Y'now, I'll give you kids some sweets too if you can agree Mr.Christiansen should go back to his own table before he lets his class form a revolt against him!" 

The two friends giggled wildly at his response, their respect transferring adults instantly. Henrik took that as his cue to check up on his own students for the remainder of lunch before they truly acted on that revolt idea of his. 

_ Eikí's got a new friend, and he likes Mr.Adnan now,  _ he noted. He was getting adjusted faster than expected, which made Henrik very proud…

but very somber, all the same. Soon there would be a day when little Eikí wasn't so little anymore and he could sleep by himself and walk to his classroom solo. These were good traits, but ones that would be sorely missed.

Henrik wondered how long it would be until that day came.

-

"Fuck, where is it?"

Eiríkur scoured his locker frantically, tossing graded tests and notebook paper doodles across the hallway floor with reckless abandon. Leon closed his own locker, side-eyeing the display his friend was making with little interest.

"What is it this time?" 

He peered inside Eiríkur's locker and reactively chewed his lip, accentuating his black snake bite piercings. "You've gotta clean your locker someday, bro. I'm calling a health inspector on your ass." 

Eiríkur waved him away furiously, removing binders now. "Shut up! I've just… misplaced my lunch money, I think…" 

"You think."

The teen scowled, reaching the back of his locker with no success. "Well, now I think it's stolen." 

Leon bent down, picking up stacks of Eiríkur's junk papers unprompted. "Nobody stole it. Not if they knew they had to dig through all of this shit to find anything. You've got a better security system than, like, anybody else at this school." 

Eiríkur rolled his eyes, putting his books back. "Yeah, it's either they swim through the sea of my bad grades or they deal with the wrath of my  _ dad. _ " They shared a chuckle over that comment, the mental image of Henrik telling off a student with his dated vocabulary and fitted khakis being just too off. "Whatever, I'll just borrow some money off of Mr.Adnan or something- stop looking at those!"

Leon gave a playful shrug, flipping the stack of old tests back to the way he'd gathered them. "Mr.Adnan let's you bum money off of him?" 

"I've done it a few times, I pay him back." Maybe it was best to leave out the details of all those breaks he'd spent venting to the man about how hard it was to ask his own parents for things to have that kind of deal cut in the first place. "Working for Super Chicken has some perks besides bringing you chicken sandwiches all the damn time." 

They finished stuffing Eiríkur's locker back to capacity and started on their way towards Mr.Adnan's classroom. Mr.Adnan had transferred to the high school not four years after teaching Eiríkur's first grade and had grown to be the well-liked maths professor at their school. He and Eiríkur weren't especially close, but he was the sort of guy that everyone seemed to have some kind of special bond to, and thus Eiríkur had started asking to loan money from him since he was so careless with his own. 

The teacher was waving his students out of his classroom for lunch, pausing with a smirk when he saw Eiríkur walking up. "Oh, the canavar! Come to extort more from me, haven't you?" 

Eiríkur blushed, now under the heat of both Leon and Mr.Adnan's condescending grins. "This is the last time, I promise!"

Mr.Adnan remained unphased, reaching into his pocket for his familiar leather wallet. "You ought to be asking your own pop for this, not me." Eiríkur couldn't bring himself to respond to that, only growing redder that it had been made more of a topic than desired. 

The rest of the walk to lunch was quiet, Eiríkur facing the floor while clutching Mr.Adnan's money. Leon didn't provoke him about it, but he seemed to want to as he kept turning to his friend with subtle worry.

Eiríkur had difficulty talking to his parents, if he were honest. The past few years of his life had been so hectic with school piling up and finding a job that would have him, baggy linty-sweaters and all, so he'd just pushed the two away more than he'd wanted to. Sigurd was one thing, always busy cramped up in that dreary office of his with no time to chat, and Henrik… 

He was a little bit embarrassed of Henrik, if he were being honest. The man was just so colorful and enthusiastic, Eiríkur felt overwhelmed being around him too long. Days when Henrik was his sub were ones Eiríkur had been trying to repress without any luck, the periods being spent with Henrik singling him out for questions and insisting on sharing all of Eiríkur's life stories to his colleagues. 

Eiríkur loved Henrik, but he just didn't care to say it. Maybe this was why Henrik pushed so hard, he supposed, but it's not as if that could be remedied now. He was much more comfortable speaking to Mr.Adnan or Leon and his other friends if he needed anything, so that was just that. 

Whether he liked it or not.

That night after an unsually draining day of school, this sudden craving weighing down on him all at once, Eiríkur found himself lingering outside of his parents' bedroom, contemplating his actions like they threatened his mortality. It was nearly midnight and yet he couldn't seem to get any sleep. He just couldn't get that comment from Mr.Adnan out of his head. 

He missed his parents. 

They used to be his backbone. He used to cry just to have Sigurd pick him up and Henrik make silly faces to cheer him up. Now Eiríkur was bombing almost every test and he just got a slap on the shoulder and an "I expect more from you" from Sigurd. He couldn't help but find irony in that sentiment anyway- it wouldn't be so bad if he got proper lecturing, just to know the bastard cared. 

Henrik would wake up, though. 

Eiríkur clasped his hand around the doorknob and reluctantly pushed it back, successfully making his way in.

Henrik woke up, blinking hesitantly at the light before perching himself up with an arm. 

"Can't sleep," Eiríkur mumbled. 

His father only smiled, lifting his blanket up. Eiríkur felt his eyes sting a bit, turning to close the door and keep the light out. 

There wasn't as much space as there used to be between Henrik and Sigurd, but Eiríkur found that after all these years, he still fit perfectly. Henrik combed his hair just like he used to, soothing his Eikí to sleep. 

What he wasn't expecting, was Sigurd to sleepily drape an arm around his waist as well, pouring his voice into Eiríkur's neck like a warm scarf that wrapped him so snugly, adding a completeness to the warmth he was feeling at last.

"We love you so much."

That was enough, Eiríkur decided. It didn't fix everything, but it was good to know they still cared, something that ate at him so sickly. 

Maybe he would ask for pancakes tomorrow. 


End file.
